A dubious claim to a First Fleet father made Jane Rose a wealthy Thirroul landowner

Not long after arriving at Sydney Cove in 1788, the First Fleet convict Elizabeth Evans and her little daughter – the future Jane Rose of Thirroul – were shipped on board the Supply to Norfolk Island. On board the Supply was 2nd Lieutenant William Faddy.

Pretty soon Faddy had shacked up with Elizabeth Evans and her young daughter.

During the First Fleet voyage of the Friendship to Australia in 1788, Lt. Ralph Clark notes that a convict named Elizabeth Barber (“a book stitcher”, of all trades! – who stole 27 shillings and a watch) abused Doctor Arndell “in a most terrible man[ner] and Said that he Wonted to f*** her and cald him all the names that She could think of“.

After a screaming match, Captain Meredith had Lizzie Barber put in leg-irons. But even this did not have the desired effect and she then started to include similar remarks about Lt. Faddy into her tirade.

Elizabeth’s young daughter Jane eventually married reasonably well to a man named Thomas Rose who was part of the first non-convict family to come to Australia and willingly settle here permanently.

Jane and Thomas Rose had a son named Thomas Rose the second, who managed to get the first free land grant in what is today Thirroul, where both young Thomas junior and his mother settled in 1828.

Thomas Rose junior, however, ran away to sea and was never heard of again.

To her dismay, Jane Rose discovered that her son had built their house just outside the northern boundary of their 60-acre (24 ha) grant at Thirroul and Jane thus found herself living in a house built on land her son had not been granted.

So Jane (who may not have been literate) got an agent to write a request to the Colonial Secretary for an adjustment of the boundary of her land at Thirroul in which Jane Rose’s trump card became a somewhat distant and hazy memory of the First Fleet’s Lt. William Faddy with whom Jane’s mother had cohabitated on Norfolk Island.

It was so hazy that Jane didn’t even remember Faddy’s first name correctly. Nonetheless, in the letter Jane Rose describes herself as a child who came free with the First Fleet and with a father who held the very respectable position of “Lieutenant of Marines”.

Even if it was stretching the point to claim Faddy as her father, it was a highly intelligent gambit on the part of either Jane herself or the agent writing the letter for her.

Jane Rose, of course, was lucky to have even been in the Colony of NSW at all, let alone in a position to claim her father was a Lieutenant of Marines with the First Fleet.

The general practice for children (although there must have been exceptions) seems to have been that they could only accompany their convict mothers on the early convict fleets to Australia if they were under six years of age.

Some children above that age were apparently left waiting on the docks, waving goodbye to a mum they would never see again.

Miraculously, Jane Rose happened to have written her first little letter to the Colonial Secretary requesting land written at a most propitious time.

Governor Darling had introduced a scheme whereby generous land grants were being given to “respectable” ladies of marriageable age. The scheme was designed to assist very large families made up of many daughters.

Remarkably, Jane Rose’s letter had an even better result than she could have dreamed.

Governor Darling or one of his underlings solved Jane Rose’s boundary problem by granting her a full extra 60 acres adjoining the northern boundary of her son’s original grant.

That meant Jane Rose then owned most of present day beachside Thirroul and even quite a bit west of today’s railway line.

Had the Rose family been able to hang on to the full 120 acres (48.5 ha) they would (based on todays’ shocking real estate prices) likely be among the richest people in a Thirroul today full of what appear to be plenty of seriously rich people.

Back in England the egregious Lt. William Faddy got to know Horatio Nelson.

Serving on Nelson’s ship, The Vanguard, in the Battle of the Nil, Faddy was listed first among the officers aboard his flagship who were killed.

Remarkably, a child named Francis Horatio Faddy, would later be born in NSW to a William G. Faddy in the year 1851.

At his enlistment in WWI in 1915, this Lt. Francis Horatio Faddy (born in Sydney in 1894 as the great-grandson of Captain Faddy of HMS Vanguard, who fought under Admiral Nelson) is described as a “postal employee” at none other than the “Wollongong Post Office”.

This Wollongong young Lt. Faddy was then killed in action at Gallipoli in May 1915.

History can sometimes be a very circular story – but one that oddly makes it possible to very obliquely connect Horatio Nelson with the earliest land grant in Thirroul.

Jane Rose is buried in the old cemetery at South Beach Wollongong.